As members of the reality-based community, progressives recognize the unprecedented threat facing our world, as well as our responsibility to protect our common future. In a column today characterized by classic conservative capitulation, the National Review Online's Jonah Goldberg emboldens our enemies with defeatist rhetoric and even a hint of appeasement. Is he not aware that his words provide aid and comfort to carbon emitters throughout the world who, this very minute, conspire against us?
As Jon Stewart has shown, our enemies are easily emboldened. In the column, "Global Cooling Costs Too Much," Jonah Goldberg demonstrates that he is oblivious to this danger. His eagerness to surrender to those who would destroy our climate is readily apparent in the subtitle, "There are no solutions in the realm of the politically possible." After all, how would we expect him to respond to a writer who concludes that "There are no solutions in the realm of the militarily possible" to the problems of Iraq?
While Goldberg's column is rife with incorrect assumptions, what leads him to capitulate to the forces of climate chaos are his values and priorities. Progressives recognize that the economy should serve the needs of people. To conservatives like Jonah Goldberg, people should serve the economy. In his column, he uses the size of the world economy as his measuring stick. Acting to avert the climate crisis is ill-advised, he claims, because it could inhibit all-important economic growth. (That the climate crisis itself could pose a great threat to the world economy is something he is unwilling to consider.)
Consistent with the strict father model that shapes conservative thought, Goldberg implies that, where improvements in life expectancy, literacy, and other measures occurred in the 20th century, they are benefits of the market. Perhaps he cites these to appeal to those who are not conservative true-believers and need convincing that the market does more than just help the rich. Goldberg cannot acknowledge that improvements in areas like literacy or longevity could have come from public education, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, or other investments in the common good that conservatives reject. Why are we to expect conservatives who opposed defending our citizens from illiteracy, hunger, and illness to provide answers to the new threats that we face today?
At the same time, Goldberg fails to admit that markets are created and regulated by government, often in ways that industry and conservative ideologues resist in dire terms. The economic growth that Goldberg touts was not achieved in the absence of government, but with countless government regulations, taxes, and legal protections for workers and the environment that he opposes.
This typifies a familiar pattern among conservatives: First, resist a progressive measure (such as the Clean Air Act, air bags, or minimum wage increase) on the grounds that it would bankrupt industry. Then, after the progressive measures are enacted and the benefits are realized over time without bankrupting industry, give the market credit for all the benefits. Argue that we must defend the free markets that provide us those benefits and resist the latest progressive proposals. Repeat as needed. A lack of historical context apparently goes a long way.
Goldberg's market idolatry, a concept that George Lakoff and the Rockridge Institute discuss in Chapter Five of Thinking Points, leads him to frame what we now face as a choice between X amount of global warming and Y amount of economic growth. The assumptions he uses about what these amounts will be are nothing short of stunning. Goldberg asserts that the average global temperature rose 0.7 degrees Centigrade in the 20th century, while the world's economic output grew 1800 percent. He then makes the groundless assumption that this could continue until the end of the 21st century:
"Given the option of getting another 1,800 percent richer in exchange for another 0.7 degrees warmer, I'd take the heat in a heartbeat."
Of course, the world's population (PDF) increased from about 1.7 billion people in 1900 to about 6 billion in 2000, and will grow by billions more in this century. Goldberg refers to plans to build 2,200 coal-burning power plants in China by 2030, but fails to make the connection. Instead, he implies that in this century far more people plus far more use of fossil fuels per capita could somehow result in the same small increase in global warming that occurred in the last century. After acknowledging that it might turn out that the earth will heat up more in the 21st century than in the 20th, he quickly proceeds to mock Al Gore and accuse those who point to evidence of climate change as acting "deceitfully." Surely, those who rely on our complacency toward the dangers we face are heartened by such words.
Goldberg's faith in the market also leads him to make an offer to placate those who would do harm to the air and the climate on which our lives depend. In a concession that resembles classic cases of appeasement, he asks that we wait ten years or more before protecting ourselves from the gathering climate crisis. To justify this, he offers only the unsubstantiated claim that waiting a decade will make it possible to "solve global warming at a fraction of today’s costs." Apparently, right on time, the market will bring us new technologies that will solve all our problems. Anticipating the reader's question, he writes, "What technologies? I don’t know. Maybe fusion. Maybe hydrogen." To recap his argument, the problem of global warming is minimal or unknowable, but new technologies will rescue us without public investment to develop them. Why will the market produce these magical technologies for us, if we do not impose economic incentives favoring cleaner sources of power, which he opposes? That question goes unasked and unanswered.
After examining his words, are we to believe that Jonah Goldberg is just an unwitting dupe of the formidable forces that imperil our existence? Or is he part of a fifth column of conservatives, conspiring to defeat us from within?
Written by Evan Frisch, an employee of the Rockridge Institute, who blogs as evan_at_rockridge at the Rockridge Nation blog, where this is cross-posted.
I also encourage you to check out a related diary by KingOneEye called "The PEP Squad: Perpetually Erroneous Pundits."